Hi all! I bought a beat up GL1500 a few months ago for a steal. You get what you pay for. I plan to take the thing from NC all the way to CA and back this summer, so I'm going through it with a fine-toothed comb over the winter. Its been giving me all sorts of hell in the cold weather- rough starts, carbs missing, stalling and surging, etc. I figured I'd start by reading my spark plugs.

Does anybody know if/where I can get just one of the rubber spark plug caps? Just the rubber part that covers the spark plug well. The center plug on the right side is missing it, and its full of nasty crap thats gonna suck to clean out, and I'd like to avoid having to do that in the future.

Also, the guy before me was an electrical butcher. He wired in two toggle switches (both of which have since broken); one on the left and one on the right (just below the CB radio switches and the suspension buttons, respectively). He says he wired them to the cooling fans to make them manually controlled, but he left such a rats nest of wires under the fairing that I honestly can't tell where they go. Has anybody heard of someone wiring the cooling fans to toggle switches? I'm going to replace the switches and turn them on and see what happens.

The cooling fans are normally controlled by the fan thermostat. Its function is to ground one lead of each motor, which then turns them on when the thermostat reaches the specified temp. The other lead to each motor should be 'hot' whenever the ignition switch is on and the bike is running. If he did it right, he should have just tapped into the 2 ground wires on the fans, run one of those wires to each switch (1 wire in - 1 wire out), and connected the other switch wire to chassis ground. That shouldn't have created a 'rats nest' of wiring. As a matter of fact, I don't think he would have even needed 2 switches and 2 taps. The grounds are common from the thermostat, so tapping into either one, should turn on both fans. Its a pretty simple circuit.

As it stands, do the fans turn on automatically when the engine reaches the upper limit of its temperature range, as indicated by the temp gauge ? If not, he may have done some unnecessary, and detrimental rewiring. You would not want the fans to operate ONLY by manual switch. That would be a bad thing, if you forgot to turn them on. They should still turn on by themselves, as controlled by the fan thermostat. You also have to wonder why he made this modification. Bike overheating ? Thermostat bad ? Bad water pump ? Clogged radiators ? The auto system usually functions fine when stock.

Can't help you with the plug boot. Looks like you might need to get part #5 in the attached link. The entire ignition wire with boot.

Update: I replaced both switches. The right fan turns on when I flip the right switch- even with the bike not running. The left fan does not. Leads me to assume- the right thermostat blew, so he put it on a manual switch, and made the left fan a switch with the good thermostat for funzies. Or the left fan is bad. I'll take the fan out and test it on a 12v when I pull the plastic off to do the carbs, which is next on the list.

Also, on the left side, I found a 4-wire connector not plugged in to anything. And a hose coming off a nipple on the intake manifold with a metal plug in the other end that looks like it had been crimped. I can't seem to find it on any of the parts diagrams. any ideas?

I love the goldwing on the highway, but I miss my harley in the garage. Everything was simple in those days... (evo)

There is no left and right thermostatic switch. There's just one, and it controls both fans.

Honestly, I think I would do the same thing that I did when I got my GL1500, which also contained miles of rats-nest "creative wiring" - just rip out ALL of the wiring done by the previous owner and return the bike to stock before doing any further modifications.

And I'm strongly considering just re-wiring the whole f*ing thing. I can't make heads or tails of what this guy did, and it wasn't well done anyway. As much of a nightmare as that is. But I haven't given up quite yet.

Other than fixing my previously stated issues, is there anything model-specific that I should check before embarking on my coast-to-coast extravaganza? (Other than the normal pre-trip stuff). I'll be doing c 8000 miles in June through the southwest.

At the risk of being redundant, don't forget to replace the timing belts. Clean the radiators inside and out. Search for topics related to hot weather riding tips (clothing, first aid/hydration, etc etc).